Tribal Group Blog

Tribal Group Blog

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Worcestershire safeguarding.orgdefines ‘professional curiosity’ as ‘looking, listening, asking direct questions, checking out and reflecting on information whether from data, verbal communication or observational.’ In other words, it's about triangulating information from different sources to get a better understanding of it, rather than taking a single source of information and accepting it at face value.

Holy Trinity is a CE Primary School in Rochdale. The headteacher, Mark Kenyon, has a strong educational philosophy which he has shared very effectively with children, parents, staff and governors. His approach is very child-centred and he believes very strongly that children should be listened to so that their needs are met, and they have opportunities to excel in as many of the areas of the curriculum as possible.

Whilst some education providers consider it a mathematical challenge that can be keyed into software to find a solution, world-class educators believe timetabling to be more of an art form that considers the ‘human element’. After all, the right timetable helps maximise your students’ chances of achieving potential across all their chosen subjects. The good news is that best-of-breed software providers have developed a way to ensure the ‘human element’ is central to the automated solution – so we no longer need manual timetabling methods.

The school timetable sits at the heart of school life. Our goal, as administrators is to create a timetable that gives teachers the best chance of delivering, and students the best chance of receiving the curriculum that the school has planned by spreading classes as evenly as possible with the right lesson flow.

In today’s world, technology enables us to do wonderful things. Laptops, mobiles and tablets all silently talk and connect to one another making daily tasks simple and productive. A school’s student management system should be no different when it comes to writing reports. With so many solution options to choose from, what does good reporting and marking software look like – and what other school management software does it need to integrate with to maximise time-saving?

Report writing, and assessment marking is all too often a time consuming and laborious process, especially if your software isn’t easy to use and hinders staff productivity; or if you’re using spreadsheets to keep track of students’ classes and marks. At best, your team is wasting time tweaking formulas and layouts to report and present the data. At worst, these methods can lead to substandard quality assurance practices, which could result in simple mistakes or a more serious loss of records if files are stolen or damaged.

As you know, Massachusetts' teachers holding a Provisional license* are expected to advance to an Initial license during their fourth or fifth year of teaching. The traditional route to licensure (Route 1) requires grad school, intensive study and student-teaching scenarios. For some people, like Katherine Flynn, this felt like a ‘step back’. An experienced Special Educational Needs teacher, just three classes away from her Masters in teaching, Katherine started to research alternative ways to achieve licensure – quickly:

Before his move to Massachusetts, Stephen Pettit had been a teacher for a long time. His route to teaching was a more unusual one. Despite having always wanted to teach, Stephen graduated from his undergraduate degree in the early 1970s and was advised not to go into teaching, because at that time there was a glut of teachers and no one was hiring. So he began a very successful career in the steel industry, working his way up over the next 30 years: